Fox television is making a splashtastic foray into the Triple Crown.  When national Fox broadcasts the Belmont Stakes for the first time on June 10, it will bring Tom Durkin out of retirement to call the race, it was announced Thursday.  Durkin, 72, retired from the New York Racing Association in Sept. 2014 after 24 years, his final call being the 2014 Spinaway when he said that Condo Commando was “splashtastic” as she cruised to a 14-length win in the slop at Saratoga.  Durkin was the voice of the Triple Crown on NBC from 2001-10. As the track announcer at NYRA, he got to call 24 runnings of the Belmont Stakes. He never got to call a Triple Crown winner. Nine times a horse came to the Belmont with a chance to win the Triple Crown during his tenure and lost. As fate would have it, American Pharoah ended the sport’s 37-year Triple Crown drought in 2015 with Larry Collmus in the booth.  “There’s no sporting event in the world that has the intensity of the stretch drive of a Belmont when the Triple Crown is on the line,” said Durkin, who called races for 43 years. “With American Pharoah, there were 37 years of anxiety condensed into the stretch of that race. There’s nothing like it and don’t I know it because I’m 0 for 9.”  Durkin will announce all races aired during the network’s coverage on Belmont Stakes Day -- scheduled for 4-7:30 p.m.   :: Bet the Belmont Stakes with confidence! Join DRF Bets and get a $250 deposit match bonus, $10 free bet, and FREE DRF Formulator! “We are honored to have the legendary Tom Durkin return for the Belmont Stakes this year,” Fox sports president of production/operations and executive producer Brad Zager said in a release. “When it became official that an iconic piece of the historic Triple Crown would air on Fox, we knew it could only be complete with Tom’s voice as the soundtrack.”  Durkin said he was content in retirement before this opportunity came along.  He did community theatre, went back to college to get his degree, worked for the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame, and did some work for West Point Thoroughbreds, a horse ownership syndicate.  “I was okay with being retired all that time and I think mine is a real retirement,” Durkin said. “It was nine years. It wasn’t like Tom Brady who came out of retirement before you could say Gisele Bundchen.”  Durkin said he does not intend to make a full-time comeback to the booth.  “Right now, it’s a one-off. I don’t know what could follow. I have no plans or ideas. I’m going to see how it goes,” Durkin said. “I would never go back to being a day-by-day race caller.”   In preparation for his return, Durkin said he will come to Belmont Park leading up to the Belmont Stakes and call races into a tape recorder.  “I got to give these Fox people a lot of credit,” Durkin said. “They have a lot faith in me to be able pull this off. If you had a bad tooth, would you go to a dentist that hadn’t pulled a tooth in nine years to do that? They’re putting a lot of faith in me so I’m putting a lot of work into it so I don’t embarrass myself.”  In January, 2022, Fox announced it had signed an eight-year deal to broadcast the Belmont Stakes. Fox’s affiliates, Fox Sports 1 and Fox Sports 2 have been broadcasting NYRA’s races on a daily basis for the last several years.  :: Want to learn more about handicapping and wagering? Check out DRF's Handicapping 101 and Wagering 101 pages.